Testing.

Okay.

Good evening, testing.

I can hear myself.

So good evening.

We'll get started.

Thank you so much for coming out during this summer, July evening.

I know that your time is valuable, and so we'll get started on time.

Uh Washoe County remains committed to transparency and making it easier for our residents to understand how public dollars are collected, allocated, and spent.

While this information has always been publicly available through our budget documents and financial reports, the Washoe County checkbook makes it much easier to explore county revenues and expenditures in near real time.

We update every night.

Budget 101 has become an important part of our commitment to public engagement.

This session is designed to walk residents through how the county is budget is developed, explain the decisions that shape it, and provide opportunities to ask questions and learn more about the process.

For those who couldn't attend tonight, this presentation is being recorded and it will be available on our YouTube channel.

We encourage everyone to watch it, share it with others, and reach out with your questions.

The Washoe Checkbook continues to build on Nevada's commitment to open government and financial transparency developed in coordination with statewide transparency efforts.

This tool gives residents direct access to the county financial information and supports informed civic engagement.

So that's from our chairwoman.

And again, she regrets that she could not be here this evening.

But this is an event that she really spearheaded last year.

This is our second uh annual budget 101.

We're very excited to be here.

A little bit of housekeeping, and then we'll get right into it.

My name is Abby Yakobin.

I'm your chief financial officer.

I have been in this line of work since 2003, but here at the county since uh 2022, so about three and a half years.

This presentation will be just over an hour.

We've budgeted an hour and a half, but we usually spend about an hour, and then I have some frequently asked questions that I'll ask our teammates to answer that we couldn't naturally weave into the presentation, but are really interesting.

Um let me introduce my my teammates.

This is Comptroller Kathy Hill.

I'm gonna try it, and this is budget director Lori Cook.

Kathy Hill has uh more than 15 years of experience in municipal uh government finance and many, many more than that in in finance and accounting.

She has a bachelor's of science in um in accountancy from UNR, and she is instrumental in preparing and disseminating and making sure that the financial statements are done accurately, correctly, transparently, and on time in the nationwide best practice format, which is called the annual comprehensive financial report.

You can see that on our website, and she's instrumental in that.

In addition, she was instrumental in creating and publishing the checkbook, which has been online for more than a year now, but it's very exciting because it updates almost in real time and it gives you more access quicker to our financial information.

So thank you, Comptroller Hill for that.

And uh budget director Lori Cook.

Lori has more than 20 years experience in municipal finance and an MBA.

Lori is instrumental uh in her with her team at creating the the county's budget book, and we present that budget book in again the government finance officers association best format, best nationwide best format.

Um, and so we have won that award about 25 years in a row, 23, 24.

We might be approaching 25 now.

I know you know this.

Um, and so that is something that isn't an amazing feat.

It takes uh it takes several months, and it is uh it's also on our website, and I know you'll be speaking about that.

In addition, she's nationally recognized for uh revolutionizing the process of doing the budget internally so that we have more collaboration, more listening, and we can do more innovative things uh with the same number of dollars.

So that is something that we're very, very proud of.

These are brilliant colleagues of mine, and I'm thrilled to turn this presentation over.

Lori will kick us off with the the forecasting and the and the puzzle piece, and Kathy will will um will take the the floor second because she's going to be talking about actuals and where to find those in the checkbook and how financial reporting works.

Um here I'm going to turn it over to my esteemed colleagues.

And then I'll ask you some, as we've done before, I'll ask you some frequently asked questions that didn't weave themselves into the presentation, and then ask you what questions you receive so that you can tell us.

And uh a moment of housekeeping that I didn't think of.

If you have questions, there are there are little cards of paper in the back.

If you want to raise your hand if you have a question, I'll run one to you, and then we'll incorporate that into the QA at the end.

Thank you, Nancy.

Thank you.

Pretty good.

So again, uh, my name is Lori Cook.

I am the uh division director of budget for the county.

Um, have been in the budget division since 2013, the uh budget director since 2018, but I started uh with the county in 1999.

So uh been around for a little bit and seen a lot of changes, and um that's one thing is that we are fairly fairly small county, so we do get a lot of interaction with other departments.

Uh we have active department heads, they carry caseloads, so we don't have a lot of figureheads, uh, we have a lot of uh work.

So that goes into uh when we talk about budget and planning and strategic planning.

So we will just start with I'll start with being a little bit closer uh with the So I'm not gonna read this, but the interesting part, in my opinion, is in government, most times we're lagging, right?

So we're following the private sector.

So when we had um implementation of Sarbon's Oxley, for example, we followed.

So we follow best practice, but something happens in the private sector, we're like, oh my goodness, are we at risk in the in the government or in the public sector?

We might be.

And so we look at our best practice and our policies and our principles.

So this budget in and of itself actually comes from government.

It comes from, you know, handing out the budget and having the purse.

Um, and then was incorporated into uh the the private sector vernacular.

So what is a budget in its simplest form is the financial plan, which funds the operation plan and it's also communication tool.

Um so it talks about where are we going to go.

Obviously, in the state of Nevada, we do an annual budget where uh the state itself does a bi-annual budget, so two year budget, we can only do a one-year budget.

It doesn't mean we can't plan for future years, it just means we have one adopted budget at a time, so one year at a time.

Um it's so it represents our legally approved appropriations.

So basically we're identifying telling the money where to go based on priorities and based on board action rather than wondering where it went or trying to figure it out on the back end.

There's still some of that on the back end, um, but uh it's it's the roadmap.

And then the budget and the budget decisions are based on strategic priorities established by policymakers.

Um, and there's just a list of different policymakers here, but sometimes I somebody asked me if it was typo, and it's not.

You can see spouse on there, right?

So if you're at home, perhaps your spouse is your policymaker on what's prioritized and what you spend your money on.

Um, but we have everything from the federal level all the way down to our uh board.

And we it's not an exact science.

So we're using estimates, we're using forecasts, we're using the information that we have, particularly when it comes to uh contractual, whether it's personnel or whether it's vendors, uh, we use the information we have.

We might not have a new renewal amount or those types of things, and so we use our we'll look at historical analysis and we do, you know, so it's educated, it's based on information, but it is still a forecast.

Actual cost almost never exactly match the budget.

So I tell this when I'm uh if I have new analysts or if I'm working with departments, if your budget matches your actuals to the penny, there's probably a problem.

There might not be, but I would look at it.

Or if you have an area where you have budget with no actuals or actuals with no budget, those are the things you need to look at and make sure that things are appropriately either the budget needs to be corrected, or maybe the um actuals need to be adjusted.

Moved, not changed.

Um it's not limited to money, right?

So every budget time, you budgeted time to come here today.

So time is a part of budget, supplies, energy, talent, skills, natural resources.

Um, that's you know, pretty um, it's not an all-extensive list, but I will when I've talked to like middle school kids, right?

Uh students, and they don't think they know what a budget is.

And so I asked them, I say, well, what do you what do you do for money?

And you know, I get allowance money, or one kid actually had like his own like landscaping business.

And I said, okay, so then you have to budget time, right?

Yeah.

So where do you spend your money on?

And it's amazing what eighth graders spend their money on.

Um, but they budget it, right?

They're like, well, I don't have enough money to get the skateboard, and a lot of them were talking about Timu.

I don't know why, but they buy stuff from Timu.

Um, so right, so they're doing multiple budgeting, and that's what we do like all the time every day.

So a lot of people think about budget as being, you know, this very formalized, and for us it is a formalized process, but we all do it.

So what could go wrong?

Um, if we do not have a legally adopted budget per the requirements of statute, which there's a lot of statutory requirements, um, our previous year, so we just started this year with July 1.

Our previous year's budget would become our next year's budget, and we would not be able to change that unless we got approval from the department of taxation.

It could also go to the CLGF, the committee on local government finance, depending on what's going on with the county or the local entity.

Um, and then inaccurate and non-certified budgets also have potential impacts on our credit rating.

So just like individuals, we have a credit rating.

The county has a credit rating, and we are rated by Moody's and SP, and it's you know, double A plus stable.

Uh we got an upgrade about a year and a half ago, uh, which is great news.

But uh, so if there's things that don't look right or things that don't go to plan, we have um credit rating agencies as well as potential investors looking at this information uh routinely.

Here is our timeline, and we are continuing to update the strategic planning and the annual budget process.

Um this year in particular, we had a budget workshop in January, uh, which followed the initial outlook.

That was new, so it was you know, public engagement as far as budget workshop.

We had our, I think they're our financial like national financial advisor, I don't use the wrong term, and then we had a local economic um expert come in and give the board information.

We had discussion, and then um we had many, so rather than having a full board meeting, there were many three, I think so far that had specific topics related to the strategic plan.

And so that's uh strategic new strategic plan is being finalized as we speak.

So um we and that was based on a Rough Tellus report from spring a year ago, so spring 2025.

So making progress in that area, but generally speaking, this is the outline of the budget process.

So we start with well, I'll talk about that in another slide, but um it's all year.

Um let's talk about it now.

It's all year.

So it is not we start here, we stop here, and then you know, we do all these other things.

Uh, we really are looking at this all year, working with departments, meeting, um, talking about priorities, uh, different things come through, things we don't plan for.

Uh so figuring out how to address those from a budget perspective.

This is our cycle.

Our budgeting process is incremental.

It's otherwise known as base budgeting.

So, what happens is what you what a department or what the county has right now is their adopted budget rolls into the following year.

Uh, we do make uh adjustments for information we know.

So if we know there are collective bargaining agreements or um contract increases, or we're not in that building anymore, so we're not leasing it anymore, so we can reduce that budget.

That's what we do as part of the base.

Um, and then departments will ask for additional resources.

So we call that above base, some people call it service level adjustment, different agencies call it different things.

We call that our above base.

Um there are right pros and cons to all of these different potential budget processes.

Um, so incremental has its own right.

We talked about it, that's why we're changing our process.

You have things from maybe decisions from 40 or 50 years ago that are now kind of baked in as base.

So, how do you how do you go back and review that and say is this the highest and best use, you know, of our resources?

Uh, there's priority-based, so there's different ways you can have pro performance-based where you have um budget for performance or performance outcomes are used as part of that process program.

Uh, you can have a target-based budget where this is how much money you have.

Tell us what you know how you're gonna get there.

And then zero base.

Zero base is is uh can be used in isolated events, but if we as a county tried to do zero base for an annual budget, I think it would probably I don't know if there would be riots, but there would be some chaos because you're building everything from the bottom up, you're starting from scratch.

So those are just some different types of what we would see in local government.

There are different opportunities for engagement for public engagement.

So we do have um budget workshops, we have BCC meetings that specifically we talk about the financial forecast and the outlook.

We also have formal uh public hearing for the it's the tentative budget, but it's done when we adopt the final.

Uh, there's online information.

Um, there's also uh we have Washa Leadership Tall Leadership Academies, and then if there's other ideas for public engagement, send up to us or you know, whatever, however you want to submit it, um, because it's not none of this is meant to not be available.

It's all meant to be available.

And the more people we hear from, the more our board members can prioritize, or the more they know the pulse of the community, right?

I'm not gonna read these.

Uh this will be available online as Abby mentioned, but there are a lot of different things within the budget division that we do.

So this is I don't know, it's my favorite statute, I'll be honest.

Uh so NRS, no matter what is statute 354-626, is it's unlawful to spend money in excess of your appropriations.

So if you ever see items come forward when we say we have to adjust the appropriations because we, you know, are very close or we feel like we're going to overspend in an area, we have to be within our legally adopted budget with every fund.

So our general fund is our largest fund, but we have 22 governmental funds and six proprietors.

So we have 28 funds total and a 1.1 billion adopted budget.

So you have to be your total bottom line, you have to be within your expenditure authority of your adopted budget or your adjusted.

There's adjustments we can that happen during the year.

And within your function.

So, like the general fund has multiple functions.

It supports public safety and judicial and general government.

Um, so the different functions, which is will um also be there's a list of those as well.

So we have to be those two.

We have to be within our budget appropriations by fund by function.

If it's willful, so there's a department heads.

I don't care what you tell me, I'm I'm gonna spend what I need to spend.

That could technically be a violation of NRS up to and including a misdemeanor.

So when we talk about the budget, we need to have things in alignment.

We take it, we take it seriously, and our departments also take it seriously.

So once the budget is adopted, there are different ways to adjust it.

The most uh formal is an augmentation, but augmentations are highly regulated by the state.

There are only certain circumstances that we can augment the budget or increase the appropriations for spending.

Um there's carry-forward adjustments, like in restricted funding.

So if we have donations and they're not all spent by the end of the year, that appropriation authority through year-in and close out activities needs to be accounted for in the following year budget.

Um supplemental grants and donations.

So you might see those come forward where animal services is accepting you know donations for the quarter, and um they're increasing their budget to be able to spend those donations that they've received.

And then appropriation transfers, we can reallocate net zero, so move budget within a fund cross-functionally.

We can also move budget across funds.

You see those as transfers, um, and but those go to the board.

So the board approves cross-fund, they acknowledge cross-function, but basically they they have to go to the BCC.

These are some of our county policies.

Now our financial policies are it's a whole separate section in the budget book.

Um, so I, if anybody's interested, I I direct a lot of people to those.

But we do have uh stabilization.

Um, the minimum is three million dollars.

Right now we have four.

Um, and then between 10 to 17 percent of fund balance.

So think of that kind of like a savings.

The state refers to their as rainy day fund.

Um, so in our general fund, it's 10 to 17 percent.

Um, the recommended or best practice is two months of working capital, so that's about 16.6% or 17.

Uh we have some interesting um, I want to say quandaries, but we have some interesting timing with that uh because we wait.

So we get our last large property tax, which is our largest source of revenue in the county is property tax.

We get our last large installment March ish, and then we don't get our next large installment until August.

So we're looking at funding and being able to fund those you know, five months, four months of operations with the cash that we have in the bank, so to speak.

So that's one reason why we're we're pretty um conservative when it comes to how much do we have.

It also helps us weather if there are downturns in revenues.

It gives us some time to be able to make changes.

And then another policy is to have a general fund contingency not to exceed 3%.

Now, 3% is a statutory maximum.

Um, this year in the adopted budget for fiscal year 207, we have a 2%.

Uh we are intending to get that increased to 3%, and those are things that are unforeseen.

Uh, one time, we need to respond to something or we need to do something, pay for something, and that's contingency.

That also goes to the board.

That is not a slash fund, that is not anybody goes in there and just takes it out.

Contingency is approved by the board, and then the budget for the contingency goes where the board approves it.

So we get questions about that as well.

And these are just some revenue policies that um the last the last bullet on there of avoiding specific revenues for specific programs unless legally required is one reason why we might get questions of how much does this geographical area provide in taxes and how much they receive in services.

Um there's different ways to prorate that or try to come up with a methodology to allocate that, but generally speaking, it's especially in the general fund, it's uh revenue in that supports right different different fingers.

Uh, one exception to that, which is not super new, but relatively new is the short-term rental program.

So um, and the board adopted that with the fees to cover the cost of the program.

So that was a direction.

There are some legal mandates, legal things that make those our special revenue funds are an example of that.

So the property tax that is levied can only be used for that purpose.

So the property tax levied for animal services can only be used for animal services.

It can't be used for technology.

Well, that's not a good example because they have their own tech.

It can't be used for the sheriff's office.

So those there are some other legal restrictions there.

Expenditures.

So we have some policies here, some description of the base budget, the net zero budget adjustments.

Um, but basically, the top or the first one on there is operating and capital expenditures shall not exceed their total authorized departmental budget.

Um, there's also some language in code that relates to that, and the department has responsibility to stay within their budget.

So financial structure.

So when we talk about functions, the the functions are on that left-hand side.

So general government would be things like human resources, finance, um, technology services, uh, some items in the manager's office, those types of things.

So you can see all those.

The ones that are on the bottom, utilities, building and safety, golf, and debt, those are on basically their own funds.

So none of those funds commingle.

But yeah, so they have their own functions, even though could you say that part of utilities might be public works and maybe, but it's utilities for the for the function of the budget and how we report the expenditures.

Then we have the fund types.

So there are different fund types.

So we have the general fund, it's a general fund.

Special revenue funds, they're multiples, debt service funds, we have two.

Capital project funds, proprietary funds are well, enterprise funds in particular, they're meant to run like a business.

So they cover the cost if they have to cut because building and safety is an enterprise fund, then they make those adjustments.

And the idea is that, well, the reality is there's not a general fund subsidy.

So they pay overhead, for example, or cost allocation.

Internal service funds are funds that support expenditures related to employees.

So our operations, internal operations.

So equipment services is one of those, like our fleet, health benefits, so the health benefits program for county employees and retirees is one, and then risk management is the other.

So and then fiduciary funds or trust and agency funds, so things that we hold, but we're not really, I mean, we're not, we're kind of spending through departments, but we're not, we don't budget those.

They get reported in the and the ACFAR in the final audited financials, but we do not budget those funds.

So you're not going to see them in a budget.

So we start with if you want to think about it in a way, the general fund is the most discretionary, right?

There's the most flexibility within the general fund.

So I look at that almost like a checking account.

Um, when special revenue funds and the savings money market, I don't know if in you guys are young, I don't know if anybody remembers back in the day when we had Christmas accounts, right?

You only use the money for your Christmas stuff.

Uh that would be a special revenue fund, right?

It's restricted or it has a sp a particular purpose.

Our debt service funds, those are the things that you pay your debt from.

Uh so that would be like your mortgage, your vehicle, capital project funds, um, construction accounts.

I don't know if anybody's had any experience with those or sometimes construction loans, right?

You can only use it for that capital project or that home or whatnot.

Then again, we have their proprietary funds, so the enterprise funds, the internal service funds, and then the fiduciary funds.

So these have a little bit more definition than what I just said on the slide before.

And then the structure.

And the reason I bring this up is if you're looking at the financials, depending on what you're looking at.

We basically are essentially we start with the largest umbrella is the fund.

So what fund does this belong to?

Then we go to a fund center, which is for us as a department, and then you can have sub fund, which is a division, right?

So they're they're building, they're building this way.

Then within that fund center, we have they're called cost objects.

So uh, for example, the sheriff's office has a separate cost center for detention, then it has for patrol.

So those are those are budgeted and accounted for separately.

Then within those, we have they're called general ledger accounts or GL accounts.

A lot of people refer to them as line items.

Um, those are the same across the whole county.

So if you are charging something or something as a professional services, you're gonna use the same GL account regardless of what fund it's being charged to or is paying for it.

Um, then we so within those general ledger accounts, we have revenue, we have expenditures, and we have transfers.

Um so if you're looking at certain reports or if you're looking at the budget book and you see some of these numbers, this is just kind of an outline of what do those mean.

So if you see a general ledger account that starts at the four, it's gonna be a revenue.

If it starts with a seven, it's gonna be an expenditure.

So this is just kind of like a little legend.

Um, and uh departments are identified in the state budget document, and then in the budget book itself will show we call them the subfunds or the um divisions.

Largest source of revenue for the entire county, property tax.

This is the um certified by the tax commission, the Nevada Tax Commission, they meet and certify the overlapping tax rates every June 25th.

If it's on a weekend, they they adjust, um, but that's by statute, they have to certify those.

Uh we are as a county at the CAP, so we're at the 364 cap.

Um, and again, the I guess this is the upper right hand corner, upper right hand corner shows those different components of the total combined rate.

And then if you happen to be like in the city, right, incorporated city, they have their tax rate.

Um, if you the state of Nevada also gets uh 17 cents, what we call it, so a 0.17.

So a 0.17.

So the county itself, with all of our funds and our 1 billion dollar budget, that's not supported entirely by property tax, but the county in and of itself is 1.3917 of the 364.

So a little more than a third.

And more information about, so there's a link in here, but there's more information about the tax commission and those those certified rates and those overlapping property tax rates.

So our total budget for the adopted budget, and this this information is also available when we did the presentation on May 19th.

It was May 19th, right?

Um this year.

And so this is a total budget.

So we have our general fund, total special revenue funds.

Um, so you can see obviously our general fund is our largest fund.

So it's about half the budget, and everything else is about is the other half.

Um so we have, and this includes when we look at the total appropriations that includes what we're expenditures, transfers out in any contingency, and we only have contingency in the general fund.

If you only look at expenditures, it's that 987 million, but yeah, around that it's close to a billion.

These are authorized FTEs, so full-time equivalence.

So we uh add or combine our positions.

So sometimes we have positions that are not full-time.

Uh the library uses, you know, various part-time positions, the Northern Nevada Public Health.

Uh, so there are part-time or not full-time um positions.

So we add them and it's it creates an FTE, which means it's a percentage of a full-time.

So if it's full-time, it's a 1.0.

If it's 32 hours a week, it's a 0.8 zero.

Um, but we can see here that we are now still below uh this 08, that fiscal year 08 number is pre-recession.

So that's like what we not that we're gonna have intention to get there, but that's kind of what we when we look at comparisons, what we peg to.

Um, and we are still below that number, but we've also had I think it's approximately a 26, 27 percent increase in population, as you can uh see, right?

So now we're at a and this is from the state demographer.

So through the state demographers' office, they give us this this um information every year.

So it's a it's quite a feat.

And so um a lot of technology and efficiencies and different things have had to occur to have that happen because we're serving more people with less people.

So if you are interested by function, some people are, some people aren't.

This is the by function of all governmental funds.

So that's that group that doesn't have the proprietary funds in it.

So you can see general government, judicial public safety.

You can see you can see those numbers in there.

It's not a surprise public safety, is the largest.

Um, the largest part of public safety is the sheriff, but the sheriff is not the only public safety uh budget.

Uh juvenile services is public safety, the public guardian, the public administrator, the medical examiner's office, um and emergency management.

Um, they're obviously smaller, but they are also part of that public safety budget.

Talk about the general fund, why do we talk about it so much?

It's half our budget.

Um, and it funds pretty much every function other than the proprietary funds.

So we have uses, we have sources, right?

So sources could be things other than revenue, but you could think of it as revenue and expenses.

And then you can see, so we have a budgeted deficit.

We have a budgeted use of fund balance using our savings.

Um, and we do our best to not have that happen.

Um, but there are things that are, you know, there are things that sometimes have to happen.

So um going into 27, that's five point six uh million dollars.

Um if we zeroed out contingency, we wouldn't have that deficit, but zeroing out contingency gives us very, very little flexibility if something were to come up.

This is a different way to look at the same information.

So you can see sources on the left, uses on the right, and then of course that bottom line.

You see, yes, you can see it.

So that negative in the brackets is that use of fund balance.

We're still, I think we but we're budgeted to be still higher than our fund balance policy of 10 to 17 percent.

So we have to be um we have to understand or give the board enough information of well, what do we need to do or what do we want to do to get within that policy level?

Transfers out are a large component of the general fund uses, and um, so this just lists the funds that are receiving transfers, and they're listed in order of um largeness.

So largest is at the top, smallest is at the bottom.

Um, and it just compares it to fiscal year 26, which was the year that just closed.

You notice if there's one time, it will be noted in here as well.

Here's the five-year forecast.

And this is based on the adopted budget and then the forecast at the time that the budget was adopted.

Things have already changed.

There are things that have already happened that were not in the forecast.

And we just we're constantly updating it based on some of these things.

And so the important is important part to see is that a declining fund balance, right?

That's not sustainable.

It's a structural deficit.

That's what the board and management is working so hard on right now is to make sure that we don't get even to 2030, right?

So that would whatever we need to do, we need to have time to do it, but we don't want to be reactive.

We don't want to, you know, I'm not gonna talk about any other agencies or whatever, but we don't want to have to make tough decisions tomorrow when we do have a little bit of time.

So that is one advantage of having some additional fund balance is it gives us um a little bit of advises some time for lack of a better way to say it.

Um again, it's a forecast.

Things have already changed.

Fiscal year 26 uh when we uh finalize 26 is not going to match this fiscal year 26 estimate, but um I think it'll be close, but it's not gonna be.

And I don't know, I don't think last time, I don't know if I went through all the supplemental before I handed it over to you, Kathy.

I don't want to bore anybody.

Go ahead.

But I love the slide because I've had both, and I guarantee you my dog would say the same thing about my cat, is that we just can't afford it.

Um I'll go through it pretty quick.

These are overviews of the different funds, so the governmental funds.

So when we talk about health is Northern Nevada Public Health Library Expansion Fund, you'll see there's no budget in that for 27.

Um, that uh voter approved tax overright did not, was not approved by the voters in November of 24.

So that is um that tax levy or that up that rate that two cents was um rolled into the operating rate.

Um, so that resides or lives in the general fund now.

So there's no budget in that particular separate fund for 27.

We did have budget in 26 because there was fund balance or savings in there that we need to spend by the end of June of 26.

So a couple three weeks ago, and then it just continues for all the governmental funds, so it outline outlines what those appropriations are.

Um, here are proprietary funds.

So you can see building and safety, our largest proprietor or our largest um enterprise fund is utilities, and our largest, which shouldn't be a huge surprise, and our largest internal service fund is health benefits by department if you want to, if you're interested by department, so it's by function, and then also within department.

So we have all kinds of different departments that are in there, and it totals up their budgets, and you can see the contingency on the right, and then the total government appropriations again.

This is a different way to look at the proprietary funds and how they stack up or how their how their budgets are in total.

And this is a different way to look at the five-year forecast with the projected through fiscal year 31.

So that green line is ending fund balance, so it's not a percentage, it's actual dollars or anticipated dollars, and then you see the bar charts that compare, you know, sources and uses or revenue and expenditures, and that's that decline is is what we need to work on for flattening.

So with that, I talk a lot.

Sorry, I like this.

Um, Kathy's gonna talk about the checkbook.

Thank you.

A little bit taller than Lori.

So after Lori's team has uh taken time to do the budget, and then it switches over to the comptrollers department for actual expenditures and what the money is spent on by each of the departments by fund, by function, by services that are provided.

There's a quarterly expenditure reporting that's required to be advertised.

That's always available to everybody online.

It's it will also you'll see some expenditure information in the checkbook when we get there.

And we also do quarterly financial reporting to the board.

That is also mandated by Nevada revised statutes.

It's important to note that when the quarterly financial statements go to the board, it is at a point in time.

So at some point it may say, well, we have you know 20 million dollars of surplus.

I equate that to you got paid on Friday and you haven't spent your check yet.

You don't really have that money, but it sure looks nice for that day that you're reporting it.

And then we also have the annual reporting for the annual uh financial report.

So just a little background for financial reporting.

And along those lines, we are audited by internal audit, external audit program audit, state audit, federal audit, personal OPEB audit, Nevada versus provide statutes.

Uh Washoe County Code, and we follow generally accepted accounting codes, uh, General Finance Officers Association and follow all pronouncements for government accounting standards board, and we also go through insurance provider audits.

So I it I like she likes budget.

I particularly enjoy an audit because it helps find how you get better and helps me support when I stand up here and say the financial reporting is accurate, it is correct.

It's a great way to say that when you pass all these these audits that happen as an example.

Now the auditors are here for the single audit, which is our federal funds, our grant funds that we receive.

There'll be approximately five auditors here for four weeks, and then when they do the other half of the audit, the financial audit, we will have six to eight auditors here for eight weeks.

So I I enjoy that.

Like she enjoys budget.

So now the presentation or demonstration I'll give you on checkbook.

This is not new information.

This has always been available in the annual comprehensive financial report.

It is more time-sensitive information that you will have access to.

So here's the checkbook that you can find on the Comptroller's website.

It contains the information that Lori just discussed with regards to the budget.

And it's not Josh.

Technical difficulties.

So when our tech guy gets me up to speed, how are we doing, Josh?

Okay, just one second.

I'll be able to walk you through some demonstrations from the departments from the divisions and the departments, and even drill down to who are the vendors that they're using to provide these services.

Hi.

It's just not up there.

Thank you.

I wouldn't go far because we're gonna get to the act first.

So there's there's an open seat right there.

Okay, so here on the the county's website, we're gonna we'll start over here for total spending.

If we click on explore.

We have several fiscal years of information here for you.

2027 is where it lands on right now.

We're just a little bit into 2027, and we are already starting our audit for 2026.

So I would recommend that you go to 2026, and then it has the different funds that Lori just discussed with everybody, the general funds, special revenue funds.

We'll go to the general fund.

You can click there, and now you can go to a particular department if you like.

I'm curious to how much the district court is spending, how much county manager is spending a register of voters.

So we'll go to district court.

And then you see within district district court, they have court administration, general jurisdiction, family jurisdiction.

And if you want to drill even further on the jury commissioner, how much is the jury commissioner spending each year?

You can go down there and it'll tell you uh the vendors that they're using.

They have legal expenses, we don't have the vendor name there.

There's multiple vendors on that.

Um Nevada Pre-Sort information such as that.

If you want to change this, there's many different ways.

I I really really um ask that you go in and play around with it.

You can't hurt anything.

You can go left, right up, down, everything will give you the same information.

So Vontage Business, that is our business provider, excuse me, our telephone provider.

It'll give you history there of how what our timeline is that we're spending it.

Is it is it right on track?

Is it or is it out of control?

Has it changed over the years?

If you're done with that, you can simply just click on the left and go back to jury commissioner.

You want to go back even farther to district court, you can go up to district court.

You want to find another department in the county, then you can go back up to the general fund and click on that and find a different department.

Like Lori said, she used the sheriff's office as an example.

They have many different divisions over there.

They have detention uh 911 detention services, crime lab patrol division.

You can go, you can drill into there and see where the money is spent on there.

If you want to look at it for 2025, you can go to the top and go to 2025.

That's the oldest year that we have on here.

Or you can go back to division and by group.

Now, all this information, where does it end up?

It ends up in the annual uh comprehensive financial report that is on the comptrollers website as well.

This information will include your budget, your budget to actual, and it's also reported in all three formats that Lori explained fund function and department.

So you want to know how much is being spent on parks and recreation, you want to know how much being spent at Reno Justice Court, medical examiners.

You can go to that report and immediately see what numbers are there to satisfy your career curiosity.

It's a 300-page report, so you might want to maybe just read the verbiage.

I know, right?

A lot of pages.

So are we oh, we're back in demonstration mode.

Thanks, Josh.

You're a hero.

So on that note.

That I just kind of melded two final slides into one.

That is your whole financial outlook from soup to nuts, budget to actuals, and all the hoops that we have to go through to make sure that you guys get the information.

And I did not do a demonstration, but I highly recommend going and reading our budget book, which is also available online.

It's great.

It's fabulous.

Not even joking.

It has a lot of information about services departments provide.

There's narrative about the county itself.

There's just a lot of really good information in it.

It's not 300 pages.

But there's a lot of good information in it.

So apologies for not going to that, but um, it's on the budget page.

You can actually just search budget book or budget in the search engine for the Washoe County website, and it should take you right to where you need to go.

And we also have archives, so we have old ones.

We have old budget books and old um, we call that the state doc, and that's the adoptive budget we sent to the state.

So those are also available.

So prior years.

Testing.

Ah, I can hear myself.

So that this is I assume that that is the conclusion of the formal presentation.

And I wanted to ask you some questions that we hear in the street, and then I wanted to ask you what you hear.

Is that yeah, okay.

What are the most frequently asked questions that you receive?

And either one of you can start.

Sure.

Um, I'll get questions of um why can't department acts just spend what they need to spend.

Uh I think we, you know, think we went over that.

Uh, what is your budget process?

So uh we talked about that as well.

Um, what does the budget consist of?

So those are the it's the right, it's the plan, it's the appropriations, and trying to think of a just uh we just get so many that and what I find is when we get questions about budget, and it'll be okay.

So, what is the budget of this department?

What the person really wants to know is how much are you spending?

Not what did you plan to spend, how much you actually spending.

So the right question is um, or what we have to filter through to get to the right answer, rather, is um oh, so you want to know what we spend it, what was spended, what we spent, not what we budgeted.

And there's obviously you don't want it out of context because it's good to know the plan and the actual, um, but we do get that a lot.

That kind of um using that term interchangeably, what's the budget?

Well, do you really want to know the budget or do you want to know the budget and or the actuals?

I think that's important because I think one of the things that made this simpler for me when I was a little bit new to this uh line of work is the the budget is the law.

When the board adopts the adopted the budget on the 19th of May, starting on July 1st of this year, it became the law.

And uh Lori and Kathy went through how you augment or change our budget, but that's how how serious of a framework it is for us to operate under.

So thank you for that.

Um so in the in the comptrollers department, I have six divisions, so I get various questions of uh how can I get my invoice paid?

How do how can I do business with the county?

Why do I owe you money?

Where can I get my W2?

Why is my paycheck wrong?

Um the risk fund.

Yes, tell us what your six divisions are because it's it's very diverse and interesting.

I have uh risk purchasing, collections, accounts payable, accounting, and purchasing and payroll.

I may have said purchasing twice, they're not my favorite.

Don't worry about it.

Um, but yeah, so we get all kinds of questions internally as well as externally.

All the employees tend to go through my department as well as vendors, um, people with public records requests, they want a copy of the contract, they want to know who does your landscaping along those lines, which is now an open checkbook.

That's an interesting point.

You may not see us that often because our customers are the 24 departments, but many times we also do interface with the vendors and and people from the public, but we are an internal services function mostly, and that's why we work mostly behind the scenes.

Um so, Kathy, just to go into that a little bit more.

If I'm a new vendor, a new business, how do I do business with the county?

And then would you go into if I'm local, do I get a preference?

Because the law is really strict on this, and we get this question a lot, but there's a really clear answer.

Yes.

So if you want to do business with the county and you have a particular business that you're doing, you're best off reaching out to the department, the department that would benefit from your services, making contact with them, talking with them.

There are um a code and statutes that we have to follow based upon the dollar amount that your business may supply for the county and the funding source, whether it's a grant funds or general fund, there's certain uh requirements that are met there as well.

Um, and then going from there, if it is a large amount, then uh the purchasing department will do a request for proposal or for request for qualifications, invitation to bid that is all public information and available on the website.

If you have a larger contract that you're looking at providing the services to the county for.

As far as local preference, we cannot solely rate on local preference.

It's the county's responsibility to get the lowest responsive responsible bidder.

So if we said we would only do local, that would not minimize the cost or the bidding costs.

We can, however, um, offer uh through the rating a little bit higher percentage points for local business, but just not on cost alone.

And what we do as an example for Amazon, the county does use Amazon, and we worked with Amazon that for common purchases, local businesses pop up first to purchase the products.

So we were able to do that.

Thank you.

And this list is much larger than it's the same, similar to last year, but it's much larger, but I won't need all the questions because you did such an excellent job of factoring in some of the items, such as uh what talk about the general fund a little bit more and talk about where do all my tax dollars go to the county or other other entities.

So thank you for thank you for doing that.

Those are questions that I get quite a bit.

Um, and why do we have other funds?

I think that would be worth going into for maybe 30 or 40 seconds if you might, Lori.

Um, why do we have other funds?

Why doesn't it all just go into one place, uh, the revenue and the spending?

Uh generally speaking, the first level is whether there's a legal mandate, right?

So if we have a property tax rate for a special revenue fund, um it can be voter approved or it can be legislative override is what they call it.

It's a polite word for saying it's a mandate you're gonna do this.

Um so it has to be used for that purpose.

So we actually have a tax rate related to detention.

We have a tax rate related to family court.

Those are actually live in the general fund.

Um, but then we have animal services.

We used to have library expansion.

We have regional public safety training center that doesn't receive taxes.

So again, the different funds at their fun at their very basis, we have to budget by function, and we have to budget by fund.

So the segregation of the funds and not having everything roll through the general fund allows us to make sure we're meeting our legal obligations, our legal requirements.

And also we could have a good example is the public safety training center.

We have local agencies and it's a participating rate.

So it's Washoe County, City of Reno, City of Sparks, um, and we are the participating agencies we contribute, and then that funds that public safety training center, the one up on spectrum.

Uh, you want to keep those separate.

It's best practice to not only have your accounting represent what you're what you're paying for to the level that does not become onerous, right?

Um, but also your budget.

So there are a few reasons.

One is best practice, um, and it can and the idea eventually is that shows you the true true cost of a program or the true cost of a department.

Um, but there are also legal requirements as well.

So can I also make the assumption that it helps us calculate rates more effectively and efficiently?

For example, sanitation sewer rates.

Uh, if we know what the spending is and it's all in one fund, and then we calculate the rates correctly, we can make that a self-sustaining model, and we're not subsidizing it with property tax or overcharging people.

Is that fair to say?

Thank you.

I had one more question.

And this this might be something that people in the audience would want to know.

If I want to have more influence or more say or input into the process of budgeting, strategic planning, um, financial reporting, or if I have questions, how do I do that?

What is what is staff's role versus the board's role?

Come to my office.

How do I get more involved?

Right.

I think um it can, I mean, it can start.

It doesn't have to be through a commissioner.

I mean, it can certainly start there or end there, or however you want to do that.

But um we do have uh certain centralized emails.

I think my email might even, I mean, it's publicly available, it's not secret, it's L Cook, it's my name at Washow County.gov.

Um, so Kathy's her name is Kathy Hill, and so hers is chill at washaw county.gov.

So she has a cool email.

I don't um, but you can send those in um as questions or whatnot, and we'll get them, we'll get them routed.

Um I think uh public comment is another good way to get something on the agenda or something um at a high enough uh profile level, uh going through our manager's office.

There's a lot of support there.

311.

Um sometimes they have a great team, and sometimes actually public records requests end up um turning into something, it's informational, but it's also there's follow-up and other things that we learn.

Uh we are going to can I talk about the the I that we're gonna be doing a survey?

Can talk about that?

Oh yes, do it.

So our plan coming up in the next couple months is also to do um a citizen survey or citizen outreach.

And so again, that's us pushing it out, but we're hopeful that with enough information, enough people know about it.

If they're if for whatever reason they're not on the end of coming through the survey, that they'll use it as an opportunity to do to push the information to us.

So those are the big ones I can think of.

Thank you very much.

Those are the questions that I receive in the hallway and that you have told me that you receive in the hallways and and whenever you're interacting with the with our citizens.

Um I did not see anyone raising their hands for um to to enter a question.

If anyone would like to, this is the time where you can always they um my my my experts gave out their email addresses.

Mine is also online, and so for me, I have to listen to things, digest them, and then in the middle of the night I'll have an excellent or what I think is an excellent question uh that I want to ask.

And so we are we are available to you.

311 is available to you.

Our communications team is excellent and they are available.

Uh and so we are here to to help you uh understand the billion dollar budget because the number is daunting, um, but it's very transparent as Ms.

Hill and Miss Cook described.

And we're here to help you understand it and help you then engage in the process.

Our goal for having this in the summertime, it seems kind of funny to have it in the middle of July, but now we're about to, well, we're about to begin our budgeting process.

And if people understand more, then they'll feel more engaged.

And that that was our goal for doing it to kind of kick off the budget for the upcoming year.

So thank you for coming.

We're we're very grateful that you came.

We know that your time is very valuable.

We thought there was gonna be one person here.

So this is pretty this is good.

Thank you.

Thank you.